Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The visual world can be a noisy and dynamic place. This poses problems for novice word learners who must mapheard names to objects in scenes with their many potential referents. In this study, we consider how the visual stability andselectivity of scenes from the first-person perspective may simplify the learning problem. 12- and 30-month-old children worehead cameras and played with a large set of toys. Through analyzing head-camera video frame by frame, we measured the rateof change of scene information in the natural world of children in this context, and found that the visual world from the child’sperspective changes continuously. However, this change is slow and incremental – tiny steps – even across increasingly largertimescales. We discuss the importance of understanding the dynamics of real world environments for understanding visualprocessing, sustained attention, and early object name learning.